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Submission + - Moves against media outlets by PayPal. Next step in speech control: confiscation (substack.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: If you do any kind of business through PayPal, you might want to reconsider. The Big Tech platform is reportedly now seizing accounts and threatening to steal cash from people and companies that question the government.

Consortium News and MintPress both learned this the hard way recently after PayPal deleted their accounts. Both independent media outlets received a message stating, “You can’t use PayPal anymore,” along with the following:

“At PayPal, we value a safer community for our customers to do business. We noticed activity in your account that’s inconsistent with our User Agreement, and therefore we can no longer offer you PayPal services.”

The message went on to explain that any associated bank and credit card details can no longer be removed or added, and that any money in the account “will be held for up to 180 days.”

“After 180 days, if applicable, we’ll email you with information on how to withdraw any remaining money from your PayPal account,” the message concluded.

According to Consortium editor Joe Lauria, who was able to speak to an actual human at PayPal about the frozen or “held” funds, PayPal could keep the money forever if it deems that “there was a violation.”

“It is possible,” a company representative told Lauria, that his paper’s remaining $9,384.14 balance in PayPal could be seized for good if the company decides to keep it. That amount would cover “damages,” he was told.
Brighteon.TV

“A secretive process in which they could award themselves damages, not by a judge or a jury,” Lauria explained to Matt Taibbi. “Totally in secret.”

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Alternative to "Intelligent" Google Search? 2

Submitted by Captain Chad
Captain Chad writes: I first heard about Google here on Slashdot. At the time I was using AltaVista for web searches, but Google immediately proved its superiority. Now 20+ years later I struggle with Google's latest system. It appears to be interpreting the perceived intent of my search request instead of using the very specific keywords I provide. I'm often getting results that aren't on the same topic as what I'm looking for, and adding more keywords seems to make it worse. Even using double quotes doesn't help much any more. Google Search has become too "intelligent" for me to use effectively.

So I'm looking for a replacement search engine, one that searches for what I tell it to search for, like Google used to do. With that in mind, what search engine(s) do you recommend?

Submission + - Florida's Switch From Frye to Daubert: Not A Substantial Change In Admissibility (justicepays.com)

Submitted by BernieWalsh
BernieWalsh writes: On July 1, Florida House Bill 7015 effectively changed the standard of admissibility of expert witness testimony under the Florida Evidence Code.i In passing the bill, the Florida Legislature formally adopted the standard set forth in Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc., 509 U.S. 579 (1993) and abandoned the standard set forth in Frye v. United States, 293 F. 1013 (D.C. Cir. 1923). Though the Supreme Court decided Daubert in 1993, Florida courts declined to follow the decision because they considered the Daubert standard more lenient and less reliable than the Frye standard. However, a 2005 Virginia Law Review study concluded the practical results on the admissibility of expert testimony are essentially the same regardless of what standard a jurisdiction follows.

Submission + - Russia Is Jamming GPS Satellite Signals In Ukraine, US Space Force Says (space.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Another piece of space infrastructure for Ukraine is under attack, according to an NBC report. Jammers from Russian forces besieging the country are targeting global positioning system (GPS) satellite signals that are used for navigation, mapping and other purposes, the report said, quoting the U.S. Space Force. "Ukraine may not be able to use GPS because there are jammers around that prevent them from receiving any usable signal," Gen. David Thompson, the Space Force's vice chief of space operations, told NBC Nightly News Monday (April 11). "Certainly the Russians understand the value and importance of GPS and try to prevent others from using it," Thompson added. He noted that Russia has not directly attacked any satellites in orbit, but the Space Force is keeping an eye out for such possibilities.

Specifically, Russia is targeting the Navstar system of satellites used by the United States and made available openly to many countries around the world, Thompson said. (Russia has its own independent system, called GLONASS, while the Europeans have one called Galileo and China has one called Beidou.) Navstar uses 24 main satellites that each orbit the Earth every 12 hours. The system works by sending synchronized signals to users on Earth. Because the satellites move in different directions, the user receives their signals at slightly different times. When four satellites are available, GPS receivers can use their signals to calculate the user's position, often to within just a few feet.

Submission + - U.S. Warns New Sophisticated Malware Can Damage Critical Infrastructure (securityweek.com)

Submitted by wiredmikey
wiredmikey writes: The U.S government is sounding a loud alarm after discovering new custom tools capable of full system compromise and disruption of ICS/SCADA devices and servers.

A joint advisory from the Department of Energy, CISA, NSA and the FBI warned that unidentified APT actors have created specialized tools capable of causing major damage to PLCs from Schneider Electric and OMRON Corp. and servers from open-source OPC Foundation.

Privately owned ICS security firm Dragos issued a separate notice documenting what is now the seventh known industrial control system (ICS)-specific malware. “[This] is a modular ICS attack framework that an adversary could leverage to cause disruption, degradation, and possibly even destruction depending on targets and the environment,” the company said.

Submission + - Teardown of Russian drones finds off-shelf components, jerry rigged instalation (petapixel.com)

Submitted by wired_parrot
wired_parrot writes: After the Ukrainian army captured one of Russia's Orlan-10 unmanned aerial vehicles, they decided to do a teardown of it. Their findings show a remarkable amount of jerry rigged installations using off the shelf components, including the use of a Canon DSLR camera as the main image capturing sensor.
The Ukranian army posted a video of its teardown on Youtube for those interested.

Submission + - SPAM: Walmart to pay truckers $110k/year, more than double average college grad salary 1

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: For context, Walmart drivers make more than the average college graduate with a four-year degree. College graduates start out with an average salary of $55,260. Walmart truckers make double that, without the debt and wasted hours in the classroom with a nutty professor. Society sells college as a must. It’s a hustle. For some students, like those who enroll in STEM programs, college is ideal. Then there are the others who spend $100,000 in tuition for some useless degree and make far less than truckers, plumbers and welders do."
Link to Original Source

Submission + - Proposed California law threatens to make dissent career-ending (substack.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A Warning from Shanghai. A new California bill threatens to strip doctors of their medical licenses for saying things the state doesn’t like. We don’t have to imagine what that would look like.

Remember when we were told that China was a model for the world in controlling Covid? Sure, as a totalitarian state, it was able to weld people inside their homes and monitor its citizens via drone. But many in the West believed that such measures were necessary. They argued that the abandonment of personal liberty was an appropriate way to fight a respiratory virus.

Now Shanghai is the model for the terrifying dangers of giving dictatorial powers to public health officials. The harrowing situation unfolding there is a testament to the folly of a virus containment strategy that relies on lockdown. For two weeks, the Chinese government has locked nearly 25 million people in their homes, forcibly separated children from their parents, killed family pets, and limited access to food and life-saving medical care—all to no avail. Covid cases are still rising, yet the delusion of suppressing Covid persists.

The repression isn’t a tool for achieving a worthwhile goal. The repression is the goal.

Submission + - SPAM: House leaders ask WH to halt proposed NTSB regs on launch failure investigations

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes:

The leaders of the House Science Committee have asked the Biden administration to withdraw a controversial proposed rule regarding commercial spaceflight investigations, calling it “plainly unlawful.”

In an April 6 letter to President Biden, Reps. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas) and Frank Lucas (R-Okla.), the chair and ranking member, respectively, of the House Science Committee, called on the administration to withdraw proposed regulations by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) that would give the board new authority to investigate launch failures.

The notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM), published in November, would require companies to notify the NTSB in the event of a failure of launch licensed by the Federal Aviation Administration, and give the board the authority to investigate such accidents. During a public comment period that closed in January, many companies and industry groups sharply criticized the proposed regulations, calling them duplicative with existing FAA regulations and warning that they could create “a chilling effect” on industry.

In their letter, Johnson and Lucas argue that NTSB overstepped its bounds by proposing to take a role in commercial spaceflight investigations. “Responsibilities and authorities for space accident investigation are to be determined by congressional action, as reflected in Title 51 of the United States Code, not through proposed regulations that are outside of established authorities,” they wrote. “The NTSB’s proposed rulemaking is inconsistent with statutory authorities, existing interagency agreements and regulations, and it is plainly unlawful.”

The letter is not the first time that members and staff of the committee have raised their concerns about the NTSB proposal.

Every successful system accumulates parasites. The commercial space industry is now big enough that the parasitic load is increasing. Bureaucratic power grabs are just the beginning.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - Amazon Is Still Struggling To Make Drone Deliveries Work (theverge.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A report from Bloomberg details the obstacles hampering Amazon’s efforts to get its delivery drone program off the ground, citing a high employee turnover rate and potential safety risks. According to Bloomberg, there were five crashes over the course of a four-month period at the company’s testing site in Pendleton, Oregon. A crash in May took place after a drone lost its propeller, but Bloomberg says Amazon cleaned up the wreckage before the Federal Aviation Administration could investigate. The following month, a drone’s motor shut off as it switched from an upward flight path to flying straight ahead. Two safety features — one that’s supposed to land the drone in this type of situation and another that stabilizes the drone — both failed. As a result, the drone flipped upside down and made a fiery descent from 160 feet in the air, leading to a brush fire that stretched across 25 acres. It was later put out by the local fire department.
Last year, a Wired report revealed that Amazon’s drone delivery operation is struggling just as much in the UK, despite making its first-ever drone delivery near Cambridge in 2016. Wired’s report suggests that the UK outfit is marred by some of the same issues described by Bloomberg, including a high turnover rate and potential safety issues. At a UK-based facility for analyzing drone footage for people and animals, one worker reportedly drank beer on the job, while Wired said another held down the “approve” button on their computer regardless of whether there were hazards in the footage or not.

Former and current employees at Amazon also told Bloomberg that the company is prioritizing the rushed rollout of its drone program over safety. Cheddi Skeete, a former drone project manager at Amazon, said he was fired last month for speaking with his manager about his safety concerns. Skeete told Bloomberg that he was reluctant to continue testing a drone that had crashed five days previously but was told the team had inspected 180 engines on 30 different drones — Skeete doubted this assertion, as checking the motors is a cumbersome process, Bloomberg reports. David Johnson, a former drone flight assistant for Amazon, told Bloomberg that Amazon would sometimes perform tests “without a full flight team” and with “inadequate equipment.” Johnson also said the company often assigned multiple roles to one person, a claim Bloomberg says is corroborated by two other former Amazon employees. “They give people multiple things to do in a very narrow window of time to try to boost their numbers, and people cut corners,” Johnson told Bloomberg. “They were more concerned about pumping flights out and didn’t want to slow down.”

Submission + - New Speed Camera App Lets Anyone, Anywhere Submit Evidence of Drivers Speeding (totum.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A new app will allow any member of the public to submit evidence of other drivers speeding to the police. Using AI to estimate the speed of a passing car, Speedcam Anywhere, has been created by a team of AI scientists with backgrounds in Silicon Valley companies and top UK universities, reports the Guardian. The hope is it will encourage police to take speeding more seriously while enabling residents, pedestrians and cyclists to document traffic crimes in their area.

However, the app’s creators say they have been subjected to a vicious response, with many now scared to reveal their real identities due to the level of vitriol aimed at them by drivers. “We’re getting quite abusive emails,” Sam, the app’s founder, told the Guardian on condition of anonymity. “It’s a Marmite product — some people think it’s a good idea, some people think that it turns us into a surveillance state. “I can see both sides of that, but I think that if you’re going to have speed limits, then it’s the law that you obey them, and you should enforce the law. It’s not a personal vendetta against anyone, it’s just — how do we make our roads safe? “There are 20,000 serious injuries on the roads every year — how can we reduce them? And the way we reduce them is we make a deterrent to speeding.”

The app has also faced other difficulties in getting off the ground. Google initially refused to allow it on the Play Store, claiming it wasn’t possible to estimate the speed of a passing vehicle using AI alone, however this claim was later proved wrong. An iOS version has also been developed, but it has not yet been approved for distribution by Apple, who have not given a reason for the delay. “We’re not sure why they would block a useful piece of technology, something that could save people’s lives,” Sam said. [...] Currently, the app cannot lead to drivers receiving speeding tickets, as the algorithm is yet to be vetted by the Home Office, meaning it is not legally a speed camera, although drivers could still be charged with 'dangerous driving’ offenses if their behavior is deemed to be sufficiently negligent. Sam says he hopes use of the app will alert police to speeding hotspots, encouraging them to take more action against dangerous driving.

Submission + - Europe Is Investing Heavily In Trains (nytimes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Train travel in Europe is on the upswing, thanks to growing interest from travelers, a renaissance in sleeper trains, and new investments in high-speed rail lines across the continent. But to see major growth in passenger traffic — which isone of the goalsof theEuropean Green Deal— the continent’s railways will have to overcome a number of challenges, including booking difficulties and competition with short-haul flights, which remain the cheaper option on many multicountry routes. In France and Austria, the pandemic brought the planes-versus-trains question to the forefront. The French government’s Covid bailout package of Air France required the airline to eliminate domestic flights when there was a rail option that took under two and a half hours to complete; the measure was laterwritten into law.

The Austrian government placed a similar condition on its support to Austrian Airlines, demanding that the company end its 50-minute flight between Vienna and Salzburg, a journey that passengers can make by train in about three hours. The European Commission also designated 2021 as the “Year of European Rail,” seizing the opportunity to spread the word about train travel, particularly to a younger audience. While passenger traffic was growing steadily through 2019, it was starting from a low base: Before the pandemic,only 8 percent of all passenger travel in the European Union was by train. But in addition to the public relations campaign, European leaders are also working to reduce practical barriers to cross-border train travel by introducing new data-sharing systems, replacing outdated infrastructure, and building new high-speed routes, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe.

“The idea is that for train trips of less than four hours, no businesspeople will choose to fly, and for trips below six hours, normal people — tourists — will take the train,” said Alberto Mazzola, the executive director of the Community of European Railways and Infrastructure Companies, which is based in Brussels. Mr. Mazzola added that government leaders are throwing their weight behind railway infrastructure, particularly high-speed lines. “We heard this 20 years ago,” he added. “The difference today is that we are seeing the investments.”

Submission + - Sex Workers Banned from Banks Have Turned to Crypto (vice.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: From Motherboard:

Allie Eve Knox is banned from all of the payment apps and platforms most people take for granted: PayPal, Square, Circle, Cashapp, Venmo. All of this is because she’s a sex worker and dominatrix: she produces adult content for cam shows, custom clips for clients, worn socks and underwear for people who collect them.

These platforms kicked her off because their terms of use forbid anything remotely sexual—thanks to conservative cultural and legislative pressure on banks to discriminate against sex work in all forms. Some sex workers believe cryptocurrency, as a decentralized payment structure that’s more anonymous than traditional finances and less vulnerable to fickle terms of use or prudish stakeholders, could disrupt decades of deplatforming.

For our fifth episode of CRYPTOLAND, Motherboard visited Allie and Belle Creed, another sex worker primarily using cryptocurrency, at the Las Vegas headquarters for Spankchain, a crypto platform made for sex workers by sex workers.

Submission + - Will AI Make CS Grader Jobs Obsolete? 1

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Tech-backed Code.org reports that as part of efforts to provide scaled human-centered education, the Stanford AI Lab analyzed 711,274 solutions to interactive block-based Code.org programming assignments submitted by 3rd and 4th grade students to develop AI-based solutions for automatically grading student homework. The research project received funding from LinkedIn founder and VC Reid Hoffman, who is coincidentally a $1+ million supporter of Code.org, which provided the student data.

Autograding systems are increasingly being deployed at all levels of education to meet the challenge of teaching programming at scale. So, will AI make Computer Science grader and undergraduate teaching assistant jobs obsolete?

Submission + - Meet the 1,300 librarians racing to back up Ukraine's digital archives (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by nickwinlund77
nickwinlund77 writes: Buildings, bridges, and monuments aren’t the only cultural landmarks vulnerable to war. With the violence well into its second month, Ukraine’s digital history — its poems, archives, and pictures — are at risk of being erased as cyberattacks and bombs erode the nation’s servers.

Over the past month, a motley group of more than 1,300 librarians, historians, teachers and young children have banded together to save Ukraine’s Internet archives, using technology to back up everything from census data to children’s poems and Ukrainian basket weaving techniques.

The efforts, dubbed Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online, have resulted in over 2,500 of the country’s museums, libraries, and archives being preserved on servers they’ve rented, eliminating the risk they’ll be lost forever. Now, an all-volunteer effort has become a lifeline for cultural officials in Ukraine, who are working with the group to digitize their collections in the event their facilities get destroyed in the war.

The endeavor, experts said, underscores how volunteers, armed with low-cost technology, training and organization can protect a country’s history from disasters such as war, hurricanes, earthquakes and fire.

Large parts of the Internet get periodically archived through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, which partners with the organization, but the organizers also needed something more advanced, Dombrowski said. In many cases, the Wayback Machine can dig into the first or second layer of a website, she added, but many documents, like pictures and uploaded files, on Ukraine’s cultural websites could be seven or eight layers deep, inaccessible to traditional Web crawlers.

To do that, they turned to a suite of open source digital archiving tools called Webrecorder, which have been around since the mid-2010s, and used by institutions including the United Kingdom’s National Archive and the National Library of Australia. They also started a global Slack channel to communicate with volunteers.

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What this country needs is a good five dollar plasma weapon.

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